EXPERIENCE CHILLS WITH THESE THRILLERS!

1.JAWS

The original blockbuster, and a turning point in cinema history. Before Jaws, a hit movie came out around Christmas and opened in a few cinemas before going bigger. After Jaws – and ever since – big movies opened in the summer, as wide as possible, and could make it bigger than anyone thought possible. Depending on who you listen to, the shark that terrorises the beaches of Amity Island stands for communism, or Watergate, or sexual liberation, or American disillusionment, or the knowledge of death itself, or terrorism, or a hundred other things. Or it might be a film about a shark that keeps eating people. The mechanical shark Steven Spielberg was hoping to shoot eating those people kept conking out, so by necessity he had to start shooting from the shark's point of view. "The film went from a Japanese Saturday matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock," he reflected later. It worked. In the first 38 days of release, Jaws sold 25 million tickets, and changed everything.

2.THE LIGHTHOUSE

The absolute peak of Robert Pattinson's artsy middle period between the Twilight zone and the Bat-cave is this psychological horror-thriller from The Witch director Robert Eggers. Pattinson's rookie lighthouse keeper Ephraim Winslow washes up at the lighthouse of veteran 'wickie' Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) on the coast of 1890s New England. Wake puts Winslow through the mill, and it turns out that the last assistant wickie lost his mind. Slowly, the two men start to drive each other to madness as the weather and the walls close in. If you're into creeping dread, deep weirdness and spitting salty phrases like "Yer fond of me lobster ain't ye?" at friends and relatives, The Lighthouse is for you.

3.GET OUT

Was Jordan Peele’s electrifying directorial debut unexpectedly shocking? Well, that very much depends on who you ask. Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, a young black photographer going to meet his white girlfriend’s parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) in their country house in “liberal” Upstate New York. But all in the Armitage residence is very much not as it seems, and Chris soon finds that he has been summoned to the house for monstrous reasons. Peele’s film was a huge cultural talking point upon release, and was rightly lauded as an exploration of the insidiousness of racism that was both nuanced, stark and, depending on your own life experience, either startlingly eye-opening or all too familiar.

4.PARASITE

Never has a film illustrated the upstairs-downstairs dynamic that undergirds modern society quite so literally and metaphorically as Bong Joon-ho’s clever, funny and not-a-little violent drama, famously the first non-English language film to win the “best picture” Oscar. Nor is it a surprise to discover that the Korean director first conceived the idea – about a poor family, the Kims, who infiltrate the life and house of a rich one, the Parks – as a play, given that it has the intensity and claustrophobia of a Greek tragedy, albeit with a few more laughs. But who is the parasite here? The wily Kims, or the lazy, exploitative Parks? Bong provides no quick answers, but plenty to think/wince about.

5.ZODIAC

When he was a boy, David Fincher noticed that the police had been tailing his school bus. "Oh yeah," said Fincher's dad when young Dave got home. "There's a serial killer who has killed four or five people, who calls himself Zodiac, who's threatened to take a high-powered rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus, and then shoot the children as they come off the bus." So started his fascination with the Zodiac killer, and eventually this starry and masterful retelling of the manhunt which followed a string of still unsolved murders across California and Nevada – Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr and Mark Ruffalo lead it.

6.DEEP COVER

Bill Duke's noirish tale of a drugs cop who goes undercover in Los Angeles to get inside a cocaine ring is built around a brooding performance from Laurence Fishburne as officer Russell Stevens Jr and a lugubrious but flinty turn by Jeff Goldblum as David Jason. (That's the man who becomes Stevens' self-appointed attorney when he gets deep into the cartel, not the beloved elder statesman of British sitcoms.) It's all about split loyalties and shifting identities, and the theme song, by Dr Dre and an extremely young Snoop Dogg, is a banger.

7.FIGHT CLUB

It’s very easy to shit on Fight Club nowadays. The legacy of David Fincher’s film, over twenty years since it was adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, is equal parts prophetic and pathetic; it recognised the male rage simmering underneath an increasingly disenfranchised, consumerist, gender-progressive society, but failed to reckon with the true impact of that anger spilling over. Instead, sometimes despite its best intentions, violence is glorified, collective backlash is endorsed, and Brad Pitt is topless, providing toxic masculinity with a timelessly cool mascot. But however you think its messages have aged over the years, Fight Club is still one of the most important and impactful films of the past century. It also features one of the best twists in cinema history (and if you’ve somehow managed to avoid that spoiler, then we salute you.)

8.INSIDE MAN

Probably the most straightforward Spike Lee joint of all Spike Lee's joints, this heist thriller is still more tricksy and witty than most. A New York bank is held up by a gang of men all calling themselves variants on 'Steve', who set about dressing their hostages as painters and decorators, exactly like them. They set about smashing through the floor – but what are they really after? The would-be thieves' motives turn out to be a lot more upstanding than your average cash-grab, and the cast – Denzel Washington, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe – is top notch.

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